rst step has been taken,
the pace becomes frightfully fast. Three years since his belief had
been like the ardour of young love, and now what were his feelings?
Men said that he was an infidel; but he would himself deny it with a
frigid precision, with the stiffest accuracy of language; and then
argue that his acknowledgment of a superhuman creative power was not
infidelity. He had a God of his own, a cold, passionless, prudent
God; the same God, he said, to whom others looked; with this only
difference, that when others looked with fanatic enthusiasm, he
looked with well-balanced reason. But it was the same God, he said.
And as to the Saviour, he had a good deal also to say on that
subject; a good deal which might show that he was not so far from
others as others thought. And so he would prove that he was no
infidel.

But could he thus satisfy himself now that he again heard the psalms
of his youth? and remembered as he listened, that he had lost for
ever that beauty which had cost him so dear? Did he not now begin to
think--to feel perhaps rather than to think--that, after all, the
sound of the church bells was cheering, that it was sweet to kneel
there where others knelt, sweet to hear the voices of those young
children as they uttered together the responses of the service?
Was he so much wiser than others that he could venture on his own
judgment to set himself apart, and to throw over as useless all that
was to others so precious?

Such were his feelings as he sat, and knelt, and stood
there--mechanically as it were, remembering the old habits. And then
he tried to pray. But praying is by no means the easiest work to
which a man can set himself. Kneeling is easy; the repetition of the
well-known word is easy; the putting on of some solemnity of mind is
perhaps not difficult. But to remember what you are asking, why you
are asking, of whom you are asking; to feel sure that you want what
you do ask, and that this asking is the best way to get it;--that on
the whole is not easy. On this occasion Bertram probably found it
utterly beyond his capacity.

He declined to go to afternoon church. This is not held to be _de
rigueur_ even in a parson's house, unless it be among certain of the
strictly low-church clergymen. A very high churchman may ask you
to attend at four o'clock of a winter morning, but he will not be
grievously offended if, on a Sunday afternoon, you prefer your
arm-chair, and book--probably of sermons